Decided that now may be the time to revisit my wireless, which has never been ideal in my house.
Background: 3000 sqft home, mostly 1 level (there's a room over the garage, but no other "upstairs" to speak of). The house is wired Cat6 to every room (which I did; and can certainly add more if needed to support this project). Modem is (unfortunately) upstairs over the garage (media room), which is the back corner of the house. Right now, I run wireless from the router up there (Nighthawk) and an access point at the opposite end of the house with discreet network names as I've never been able to get handoffs to work.
Seems like there are two options to potentially fix the wifi:
1. Buy a mesh system that supports wired backhaul (Eero, Google Wifi. Orbi does not, so it's out. Haven't looked at Luma.)
2. Buy some of the access points for a system with a controller (Ubiquiti, Engenius, etc.)
The only real "complicated" networking I do is internal static IPs, which all of these support. The network does run a lot of traffic (my wife works from home as a photographer, and does a lot of uploading to online galleries, etc.), but our home connection speed isn't anything exceptional (60 down). No fiber in our neighborhood, unfortunately.
The main thing I'm trying to balance is something that works reliably but can also be fixed by my wife if it goes down when I'm not home. She can reboot the current router, but I doubt she'd want to try to go into a more complicated process to bring things back up. Obviously, Google Wifi has the remote management, but I imagine any of the mesh systems would be simpler than the controller based ones (but I question whether the controller based ones may be more long term stable).
Unless there's some third option I'm missing, thoughts on this?
Background: 3000 sqft home, mostly 1 level (there's a room over the garage, but no other "upstairs" to speak of). The house is wired Cat6 to every room (which I did; and can certainly add more if needed to support this project). Modem is (unfortunately) upstairs over the garage (media room), which is the back corner of the house. Right now, I run wireless from the router up there (Nighthawk) and an access point at the opposite end of the house with discreet network names as I've never been able to get handoffs to work.
Seems like there are two options to potentially fix the wifi:
1. Buy a mesh system that supports wired backhaul (Eero, Google Wifi. Orbi does not, so it's out. Haven't looked at Luma.)
2. Buy some of the access points for a system with a controller (Ubiquiti, Engenius, etc.)
The only real "complicated" networking I do is internal static IPs, which all of these support. The network does run a lot of traffic (my wife works from home as a photographer, and does a lot of uploading to online galleries, etc.), but our home connection speed isn't anything exceptional (60 down). No fiber in our neighborhood, unfortunately.
The main thing I'm trying to balance is something that works reliably but can also be fixed by my wife if it goes down when I'm not home. She can reboot the current router, but I doubt she'd want to try to go into a more complicated process to bring things back up. Obviously, Google Wifi has the remote management, but I imagine any of the mesh systems would be simpler than the controller based ones (but I question whether the controller based ones may be more long term stable).
Unless there's some third option I'm missing, thoughts on this?
